[woodrowbarlow]

> It's a well established, easy path.

i do kernelspace development in C for embedded devices.

i would take exception at "easy". i assume you're saying that because you're able to use linaro's arm toolchains out of the box, straight from your distro's repositories. and you're right, that is mostly easy.

but as soon as you need more than simply compiling an executable to run on top of an incumbent kernel, since gcc toolchains are tied to kernel version, things get hard. unnecessarily hard. recompiling the compiler shouldn't be necessary. llvm-based compilers like clang address this in a more sane way, but aren't as mature as gcc.

and build systems for C don't support cross-compiling very well either. project based on cmake and autotools will usually work with a little tweaking, but if a project just uses makefiles you'll end up re-writing the build system 90% of the time.

rust's cross-compiling isn't quite there yet, i agree, but the language's (and the compiler's) design choices set the stage for a much better cross-compiling process than you get from gcc.